The upcoming Phineas and Ferb The Movie: Candace Against the Universe will see the popular animated universe return to screens, with the titular step-brothers working with their friends to try and rescue their sister Candace after she's abducted by aliens.

During an exclusive interview with CBR, Phineas and Ferb creators Dan Povenmire and Jeff Marsh talked about returning to the franchise, why Candace is at the center of the plot and teased their potential for another Phineas and Ferb movie in the future.

RELATED: Disney+ Drops First Trailer for Phineas and Ferb The Movie: Candace Against the Universe

Officially premiering on Disney Channel in 2008, Phineas and Ferb nominally follows the titular genius step-brothers, who playfully spend their summer vacation building massive machines and confounding creations alongside their friends. Phineas' older sister, Candace, spends most of the series trying to prove their antics to her mother, but every attempt is thwarted in some silly way. Another constant in the show was their pet platypus Perry. However, Perry was no ordinary platypus. He was, in fact, a secret agent and nemesis to the brilliant, but inept, evil scientist, Doctor Doofenshmirtz.

While there have been specials and crossovers since the show formally ended in 2015, Candace Against the Universe is the first full return to the franchise in years. For Marsh, returning to the Phineas and Ferb universe was "lovely... it was like a really nice, old, comfortable jacket that you'd forgotten you had." Disney actually sought out the creators to produce the new film for Disney+, which Marsh admitted "was a little surreal. Especially now, during the global pandemic, I've been stuck at home with my family, who doesn't really think of me in that way at all. It's nice to be reminded that there are a bunch of people out there who think the weird stuff we do is actually pretty cool."

RELATED:Phineas And Ferb The Movie Debuts Candace's Solo Song

"It was daunting," Povenmire explained. "We loved coming back to the characters, but it was rather daunting just because of how much we had done before." The sheer scope of the series, and the bombastic nature of it, means that most of their early ideas for the film had actually been tackled in some shape or form in the show proper. Both creators recalled the early days of development on the film and, as Povenmire described, "sitting in a writer's room with people pitching ideas and us going, 'no, we already did that. No, we already did that. No, we already did that, that was in the third season.' It was like that for a whole three weeks, and then we wrote up the whole movie as soon as we came up with an idea that we hadn't done."

At one point, Povenmire revealed that the pair of them had even actually written "an entirely different story first, that was so different -- the executives went 'okay, this would be a great movie if Phineas and Ferb was a big hit right now and everyone was watching it, everyone knew what it was.' But it was so different that it's not a good way of introducing [the universe] to a new generation, which is what we want this movie to be."

When asked about that alternate plot, Povenmire coyly teased, "I would tell you, except we're sort of hoping we can rehash that as a next movie or something like that. It was one that was really much more geared towards fans who'd seen every episode, or at least [are] super familiar with how these characters work. It sort of turned all that upside down, turned it on its head. Maybe they'll let us make that movie at some point. That's a good story to be told."

RELATED: Disney Television Studios Rebrands Its Three Divisions

Despite not being one of the title characters, Candace is the heart of the series -- an occasionally manic but always relatable teen just doing her best to get through the absurdities of her life. While the film retains the purposefully loose sense of fun that defined the original show, the film takes time to explore Candace and her relationship with her brothers. "We figured it was about time [to focus on Candace]," Marsh explained. "We owed it to Candace."

Povenmire described how the film "became a tricky thing, because we wanted to, at the beginning of the movie to establish the end of a typical Phineas and Ferb day. If you've never seen Phineas and Ferb, you can watch this movie and you're not confused. So we showed Candace trying to bust them and never having been able to do it, how crazy she can get, and show a bust that doesn't work at the very beginning of the movie. The opening changed like, four times. She would just seem shrill, and we wanted people to be on her side. That's why the musical number at the beginning came into being.

"We had a problem like this in the last movie, and we just solved it by writing a big pop song... ["Such a Beautiful Day"] was one of the last songs we wrote for this movie. I called up a friend of mine, Karey Kirkpatrick... He worked in animation and now he was working on Broadway. We'd never worked together on anything before, so I called him up. We'd been lamenting we'd never written a song together. We were both in bands back in school! We'd go see each other play but never wrote anything together. So he came out and wrote that song with us. It just absolutely sets the tone perfectly."

"It did a lot of the heavy lifting," Marsh added, "in a very wonderful way."

The key to figuring out the plot for Candace Against the Universe, according to Povenmire, was realizing "we'd had things in some of the longer-form stuff, some of the hour-long specials or movies, where something just goes wrong or there's a real jeopardy of things going bad. But we've never let that be the driver of the story. In Phineas and Ferb, the driver of the story is always 'let's have fun, let's be spectacular.' So we were like, what if we did a rescue story? What if we put one of the characters in actual danger... how could we tell this story and still have it be fun and funny but not have it driven by their inventions?"

Juggling those elements along with classic characters and tropes (such as Perry's battles with Doofenshmirtz) was, as Marsh pointed out, was a "fine line to make sure that we made something we felt was completely satisfying to all the people who knew everything about Phineas and Ferb, and satisfy the people who didn't know much about it. It was nice getting to the end and realizing that I think we did it."

Directed by Bob Bowen, Phineas and Ferb The Movie: Candace Against the Universe stars Ashley Tisdale, Vincent Martella, Caroline Rhea, Dee Bradley Baker, Alyson Stoner, Maulik Pancholy, Bobby Gaylor, Olivia Olson, Tyler Mann, David Errigo Jr., Ali Wong, Wayne Brady, Diedrich Bader and Thomas Middleditch as Garnoz. The film will be released on Disney+ on Aug. 28.

KEEP READING: Disney Channel, XD & Junior To Go Off-Air In UK Following Disney+ Launch